Critics' Choice: New CD's

It is hard to listen to "Lookaftering," the second album by the British folk singer Vashti Bunyan, after taking in any urban noise, or any other music with even the mildest aggression. Pastoral doesn't quite describe it; this seems to come from some place more eco-protected than any in existence.

Briefly, 40 years ago, Ms. Bunyan was in line to be a Marianne Faithfull-type singer, singing forlorn songs on the fringes of the Rolling Stones' circle, but felt too compromised in the role. An old-ways hippie, she moved from London to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, returning to London only to make an album in 1969 with the producer Joe Boyd, "Just Another Diamond Day."

With her pure, light voice and guitar playing over string arrangements, the album was a solitary experience, and a deliberate step back, the willful reverse of the mind-blowings then going on in London. It reached an audience of nearly nobody, and she finally found her own songs too melancholy. (Some of the words were quite unmelancholy: poems about grubs and peat and cockerels, whose stanzas could have been broken up into separate pages, illustrated, and published as children's books.) She hung her guitar on the wall for 25 years.

The album was reissued in 2000, and its wall-to-wall serenity and innocence -- with a little acknowledgment of nature and fate -- bewitched a group of younger, inward-looking musicians like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Adam Pierce. They have all ended up here, on her second album, 36 years later.

Produced by Max Richter, who is known for modern classical compositions with electronic touches, "Lookaftering" carries on the sound that Ms. Bunyan was barely known for. She delicately fingerpicks the guitar through most of the album, backed by an unobtrusive string quartet, as before. There are some obligatory English faerieland touches -- an oboe and a glockenspiel. But there are other timbres that weren't on the earlier album: a Fender Rhodes, played by Mr. Richter, in "If I Were"; a hammer dulcimer, played by Mr. Pierce, in "Turning Backs"; a harp, played by Ms. Newsom, in a few tracks.

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Still, everything is oriented around Ms. Bunyan's voice. It wavers more now, but it is essentially the same: whispery, peaceful, with a slight undercurrent of fear or nervousness. The songs are wiser than they were before, especially "Turning Backs," which includes the quatrain "Indifference is the hardest ground/ it is the stony silent sound/ of plainsong echoing unfound/ until the voices have left town." The old songs describe the chill of innocence; the new songs describe the chill of experience. None of her music, new or old, can really be accused of naïveté.

A few songs are acutely beautiful in a way Nick Drake fans will recognize. (This isn't a coincidence; Mr. Boyd produced Drake too, and the string arranger on "Just Another Diamond Day," Robert Kirby, also arranged the strings on Drake's records.) Some are quite full, with their string arrangements, but even where they are spindly, Mr. Richter has found exactly the sound palette that Ms. Bunyan needs. The high, shimmering sounds brushing the background of the track "Against the Sky" are described in the credits as "wine glasses and Mellotron." Exactly. BEN RATLIFF

Correction: October 26, 2005, Wednesday A review of the new Vashti Bunyan CD "Lookaftering" in the Critics' Choice column on Monday misidentified the American label. It is DiCristina Stair Builders (FatCat is the label for the British version).

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A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2005, on Page E00005 of the National edition with the headline: Critics' Choice: New CD's. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe